The Delta Green Sunsetter Campaign - The Last Equation and A Victim of the Art Reports (Sessions 5, 6, and 7)
The past 3 sessions of the Sunsetter campaign saw us finishing The Last Equation and A Victim of the Art.
The Last Equation, Operation IAPETUS
We had a new player for this one, the ever-skilled Sahh, who brought a keen eye and a sharpshooter character to the table.
After last session's TPK, I timeskipped away from the 90's and into the 2000's, setting this operation in 2008.
I don't have much to reflect on this one. I quite like The Last Equation as it doesn't have any big monster to shoot, it's a very straight-laced police procedural with the potential to go off the rails if the players have the Mathematics skill, but that didn't happen with my players1. After the past two failures, they were quite focused in being as direct and airtight as possible in their investigating.
I did feel like I didn't do enough to bring the full paranoia that this adventure can inspire to bear. They refused to interact with the equation, correctly predicting it had corruptive potential, and so most of their interactions with the numbers were players noticing that they came up a lot, and as consummate professionals, they decided not to give much thought to it.
I believe part of the issue was how quickly I prepared this scenario - I had already ran it, so I simply reread it the night prior and rewrote it the morning of the game.
A Victim of the Art, Operation PECONIC
We had another friend join the Sunsetters on this one, the ever-chill Mr. Mann.
I switched the way I was prepping and running these ones, and I believe I did well, as the players seemed very engaged and interested in the mystery.
Instead of rewriting the mystery as I usually do and focusing on the mystery side of things - making up timelines, figuring out locations, thinking about the culprit - I focused on the people side of things. I kept the mystery as it is presented in the module (and there isn't much to it, it's a very very simple mystery) and expanded on the people involved. I reasoned that, since one of the victims was a teenage girl, they would eventually find themselves talking to her classmates, and so I prepared a few. Simple things, my whole prep for this session aside from the module itself amounted to 247 words. Example:
- Lauren Harrogate (one of the victims) was reviled as a "known slut and promiscuous". The rumours among her classmates is that she slept with the English teacher, Mr. Peter Barker for grades.
- Her closest friend was fellow cheerleader Megan Woods. They were in a very hidden relationship with one another.
- Megan actually is rumoured to be "a homo". Her family are of relatively fundamentalists who don't appreciate that.
- Mr. Barker knew about it, he's a family friend, and was helping cover it up.
When actually running the game, I decided to both go slower and give more details, trying to flex my improvisational skills, which I don't do enough. I reasoned the mystery would be much too fast if I simply gave away information and focused on keeping up a high speed pace, so instead of that I decided I would give as much detail as possible. Nothing should be irrelevant, no person should go unnamed, and I made a point to talk more in-character.
The result of this was unsurprisingly positive. It made me realise that, by moving so fast like I can sometimes go, I risk turning the investigation into a pixel-hunt2 game rather than a police procedural. If I only mention in a room the things that they can interact to further the mystery, it can turn into a game of "I go into the room, analyse it in such a fashion as to maximize my information and minimise my risks, and move on to the next lead", which is boring!
Thankfully I don't think my game ever degenerated to such a degree, but I could see it happening if I kept going so fast. My ultimate realisation is that session time shouldn't be that much of a concern; we are all adults, barring some exception we will always have next week, and it's these slow moments, these lulls in the conversation where the characters can come to the fore that really keep the game going, I think. Much like how a dungeon-based game cannot reach its full potential without the scaffolding of the campaign, so I believe that the mystery game will not reach full bloom if it concerns itself exclusively with keeping up the pacing and timing.
In fact, one funny missed opportunity from this past session was when the players semi-jokingly mentioned that their characters were going to eat dinner at White Castle. I thought this was just a silly but funny flourish and speedily moved past it, but after the session some of them said that they actually wouldn't have minded roleplaying out the dinner for a little bit. Which is awesome! It's exactly the kind of thing I want to happen in my games, and I feel like my players are consistent enough that we don't have to worry about this taking too much time of the session, it's not as if we were risking missing the next one anyway.
For the future
I intend on keeping up this mosey pace. There is no need to rush or speed, stopping to smell the flowers every now and then makes for a delightful game.
That said, for this following operation (which began at the second half of the last session of A Victim of the Art, since we couldn't finish it in one session) I have done something completely different which I had been wanting to do for a long time: dungeoneering in Delta Green.
This will mostly be an experiment on how the adventure framework changes the game - or doesn't - so I'm quite excited to see how it turns out.
There is a way for the DM to force the issue, but I didn't put it in as I was pretty sure that, with two characters with the Mathematics skill, something was bound to go wrong eventually... but it didn't.↩
In old point and click games, when you would slowly go with your mouse over each centimetre of the screen until you found something that was interactable.↩